A pasted-together compendium of recycled news, familiar observations and base gossip, Nigel Hamilton's new biography of Bill Clinton represents a sleazy new low in the chronicling of presidential lives. It regurgitates the most scurrilous and unsubstantiated rumors about Mr. Clinton and his wife; dwells, with voyeuristic fascination, on his sex life and uses soap opera prose and sociological hot air to recount (in this, the first of two projected volumes) Mr. Clinton's life through the conclusion of his tumultuous 1992 run for the White House.

Mr. Hamilton -- who years ago won Britain's prestigious Whitbread Prize for his biography of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery -- adopts the same sensationalistic approach he used in his 1992 biography of John F. Kennedy (''J.F.K.: Reckless Youth''). Unlike that Kennedy volume, which was based on some 2,000 interviews and previously unpublished documents, ''Bill Clinton: An American Journey'' is heavily indebted to secondary sources, ranging from credible ones like David Maraniss's ''First in His Class'' to rabid conspiracy-minded ones like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's ''Secret Life of Bill Clinton''; from thoughtful, analytic memoirs like George Stephanopoulos's ''All Too Human'' to panting, pulp romanesque ones like Gennifer Flowers's ''Passion and Betrayal.''

Mr. Hamilton makes little effort to independently verify assertions made by his more questionable sources, and he lards these pages with innuendo and conjecture.

Because of its trashy tone and unwillingness to discriminate among fact, rumor and speculation; because it plays into the Clintons' penchant for blaming the media and their political enemies for problems of their own making, this biography has the odd effect of whitewashing this former president's real failures and foibles: his lawyerly evasions and lies, his indecisiveness, his willingness to risk his administration's policy agendas on a self-indulgent, adolescent affair. The main feeling a reader who finishes this book is likely to have is a vague sympathy for anyone unlucky enough to become one of Mr. Hamilton's biographical subjects.

There are repeated descriptions of Mr. Clinton's physical endowments and snide remarks about the young Hillary Clinton's supposedly poor grooming habits. Though Mr. Hamilton repeatedly suggests that Bill and Hillary Clinton had a ''marital understanding'' about his philandering -- ''She would not expect Bill to be sexually faithful in their partnership, but she would expect him to observe reasonable discretion'' -- he does not offer any credible evidence of such an agreement.

Drawing upon sources like Mr. Evans-Pritchard's irresponsible book, Mr. Hamilton resurrects some of the most heinous and uncorroborated accusations made by Clinton haters, writing that ''the list of beatings, suicides, and even murders of people connected with Bill Clinton would, over the years, become alarmingly long.'' A host of articles and books, Mr. Hamilton asserts, attest that Gennifer Flowers was not alone in worrying about the dangers of crossing Bill Clinton. ''People were not only threatened,'' he portentously intones, ''but could wind up -- like the man falsely accused of raping a Clinton cousin -- without testicles and in prison, or even dead, if they stepped out of line.''

These are the sorts of rumors and conspiracy mongering that were once the province of right-wing extremists and right-wing publishers like Regnery, which published the Evans-Pritchard book on Mr. Clinton, as well as the former F.B.I. agent Gary Aldrich's Clinton-bashing book ''Unlimited Access.'' That such rumors are now being recycled -- without verification -- in a nonideological, professedly serious presidential life signals not only the growing tabloidization of biography writing, but also the willingness of mainstream publishers like Random House to cash in on suspect material likely to create best-seller-making buzz.

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Mr. Hamilton, who is British, sees Bill Clinton as a representative American figure, the embodiment of the baby boom generation, ''the quintessential Postmodern Man.'' And in an effort to make this case, he is constantly stuffing his narrative with awkward newsreel-like inserts and turgid asides, straining to link the experiences of Mr. Clinton and his family to those of the nation at large. Of the president's mother he writes: ''But if Virginia offended the sensibilities of judgmental, traditional white Southern citizens, it was perhaps because she so well represented -- as would her son -- the changing face of Western society as a new generation left the land and adapted, or did not adapt, to modern, latter-half-twentieth-century urban culture.''

The author's comments about Mr. Clinton's psychological makeup are a tired pastiche of observations made hundreds of times by journalists and television commentators, and they are served up in a diagrammatic Freud for Dummies-like style. Mr. Hamilton suggests that the conflicts in Mr. Clinton's character can be traced to the fights his mother and grandmother had over him, and to his childhood in the two very different towns of Hope and Hot Springs. And he argues that the teenage boy's assumption of the role as man of the house -- given his stepfather's violent and erratic behavior -- left him ''condemned to a lifetime's philandering in search of Jocasta-like substitutes.''

In addition the book is littered with weird anthropological and therapeutic asides about male sexual behavior. The bibliography even includes volumes like ''The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People,'' ''Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition'' and ''Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation'': probably the first time such books have been cited in a presidential biography.

As for Mr. Hamilton's writing, it ranges from the leering to the pompous. Sometimes he sounds like a puerile philosopher: ''The 'apple-polisher' from Arkansas, as a child of the 60's, might still want to do good as well as be good; but was this really possible in a post-modern world? What was good?''

Sometimes he sounds like a bad romance novel writer: ''Christmas 1989 thus saw an amazing epiphany as Bill Clinton, arch-narcissist, self-centered monster, seducer of women, and oral sex addict, found his selfish heart melting.'' And sometimes he just sounds like a pretentious twit: ''And as Prince Hal had felt forced to deny Falstaff on his coronation as King Henry V, so Bill Clinton had to reject the fun-loving, wayward companion of his Arkansas years: Gennifer.''

In the end, however, it is perhaps fitting that the prose in these pages is so melodramatic, reductive and foolish; after all, those are the very qualities embodied by this entire unfortunate book.

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A version of this review appears in print on September 23, 2003, on Page E00007 of the National edition with the headline: BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Portrait of a President, Warts and . . . More Warts. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe